With a paint brush in hand, Tina Vaziri is often away having adventures with Mr. Bee. Her travel notes are filled with illustrations, sketches, and stories.

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using textures effectively | May 20, 2007

You want a matured and completed look to your illustration, but there’s something missing. I find this problem in a lot of illustrations created purely in Photoshop, everything still looks too smooth and sterile. Often, adding a simple paper texture layer will do the trick. Natural looking textures bring harmony to finish up your illustration. We’ll look at the texture application in my Tattoo illustration as an example.

    Tools:

  • Adobe Photoshop (CS or higher)
  • Downloaded or scanned old paper texture (high res.)
  • Nearly completed illustration

Open your nearly completed illustration in Photoshop. Open your preferred texture file and place it onto your illustration as a new layer.

Oh, you don’t have a texture you want to use? Okay, let’s backtrack for a minute. Here are your options:

  • Take high resolution photographs of textures you like
  • Scan in (at high res.) flat textures
  • Create your own texture in Photoshop (I don’t do this, but it can be done)
  • Or the lazy easy fix, search and download (ahhh, the power of Google)

I will make it even easier for you, with some links to start you off right: mayang.com/textures, and texturewarehouse.com. (remember to give credit when required)

  • Now, pull you’re texture onto your illustration. Set the blending property of this new layer to multiply and the opacity to 30%.
  • Duplicate your newly created texture layer (by dragging it onto the new layer icon in your layers pallet). This second texture layer should be above your original texture layer. Let’s set these properties to Linear Burn at 50%.

    Here is the paper I used.

    Old Paper Texture
    Old Paper Texture


    You can mess with the blending properties, you can add more texture layers, feel free to experiment.

    The first frame has no textures, the second frame has the one layer of texture at 30%, and the third has the second texture layer at 50%. I am always pleasantly surprised by the huge difference only a simple texture can make.


    Texture Process

    Texture Process


    Related posts:

    1. glowing magic in photoshop
    2. trick or treat
    3. illustration, design, and marketing
    4. free textures
    5. free photoshop brushes
    6. photo editing in photoshop
    7. image displacement mask
    8. brushed metal effect
    9. image out of text
    10. wood engraving effect




    Filed under: art & design tutorials


    6 Responses to “using textures effectively”

    1. Adam Osgood Says:

      Woah, your blog is way different! Nice how-to. I agree. A little texture can make a so-so illustration sparkle with life.

      May 24th, 2007 at 4:49 pm


    2. emila yusof Says:

      Great tutorial!

      July 24th, 2007 at 4:10 am


    3. Lisa Says:

      I LOVE this!!! (And I almost never use exclamation points.) THANK YOU. You have no idea how much I’m loving you right now. Haha.

      September 19th, 2007 at 10:20 am


    4. Tina Says:

      Yay! It makes me very happy when people find my tutorials useful!

      September 19th, 2007 at 1:15 pm


    5. poem | The Adventures of Tina and Mr. Bee Says:

      [...] paradisemoon lightmissing the beachfuture of network managementfree photoshop brushesdiscoverytextures tutorialhome buyingmen are from [...]

      October 12th, 2007 at 10:16 pm


    6. poem | Adventures of Tina and Mr. Bee Says:

      [...] find out a little bit more about the process of this piece be sure to read my Textures post in the how-to’s section. Filed under: tina illustrates [...]

      February 24th, 2008 at 11:12 am


    Comments